Letters to the Editor
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Who expoited whom?
'We had great expectations when we went to America. We thought perhaps they would even give us an atom bomb to take back,' says Tenzin Tsultrim. 'In the training period, we learned that the objective was to gain our independence,' adds another grizzled veteran. But the Americans had other ideas. 'The whole idea was to keep the Chinese occupied, keep them annoyed, keep them disturbed. Nobody wanted to go to war over Tibet...It was a nuisance operation. Basically, nothing more,' says former CIA agent Sam Halpern.
In March 1959, the CIA made a second arms drop in southern Tibet, where the resistance now controlled large areas. Back in Lhasa, the Dalai Lama was invited to the local Chinese military camp to attend a play — sans bodyguards, the invitation said. The citizens of Lhasa rose up in revolt; the Dalai Lama realised it was time to leave.
A few days later, the Dalai Lama, disguised as a soldier, escaped from his palace and headed south. The CIA-trained radio team met them en route, and asked the Americans to request Prime Minister Nehru to grant asylum to the Dalai Lama. Nehru, well aware of the situation, immediately approved. On March 31, 1959, after an arduous trek across the mountains, the Dalai Lama and his entourage entered India. This sparked off an exodus of refugees from Tibet to India — leaving behind only small pockets of resistance in southern Tibet.
Undeterred, the CIA parachuted four groups of Camp Hale trainees inside Tibet between 1959 and 1960 to contact the remaining resistance groups. But the missions resulted in the massacre of all but a few of the team members.
The CIA cooked up a fresh operation in Mustang, a remote corner of Nepal that juts into Tibet. Nearly two thousand Tibetans gathered here to continue their fight for freedom. A year later, the CIA made its first arms drop in Mustang. Organised on the lines of a modern army, the guerrillas were led by Bapa Yeshe, a former monk.
'As soon as we received the aid, the Americans started scolding us like children. They said that we had to go into Tibet immediately. Sometimes I wished they hadn't sent us the arms at all,' says Yeshe. The Mustang guerrillas conducted cross-border raids into Tibet. The CIA made two more arms drops to the Mustang force, the last in May 1965. Then, in early 1969, the agency abruptly cut off all support. The CIA explained that one of the main conditions the Chinese had set for establishing diplomatic relations with the US was to stop all connections and all assistance to the Tibetans. Says Roger McCarthy, an ex-CIA man, 'It still smarts that we pulled out in the manner we did.'
Thinley Paljor, a surviving resistance fighter, was among the thousands shattered by this volte-face. 'We felt deceived, we felt our usefulness to the CIA is finished. They were only thinking short-term for their own personal gain, not for the long-term interests of the Tibetan people.' In 1974, armtwisted by the Chinese, the Nepalese government sent troops to Mustang to demand the surrender of the guerrillas. Fearing a bloody confrontation, the Dalai Lama sent the resistance fighters a taped message, asking them to surrender. They did so, reluctantly. Some committed suicide soon afterwards.
Today, the survivors of the Mustang resistance force live in two refugee settlements in Nepal, where they eke out a living spinning wool and weaving carpets. 'The film is for the younger Tibetans, who are unaware of the resistance, as well as for Americans, who don't know how their own government used and betrayed the resistance,' says Tenzing. 'Though it was a story begging to be told, funding it was almost impossible,' adds Ritu.
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@ondolette
Thanks for stating it so clearly. I once had a discussion with a chinese professor who told me that what they had done to the Tibetans was no different than what americans had done to the native populations of north america. He was surprised when I agreed with him. Yes, we perpetrated those kinds of horrors too. And I am ashamed of all it. It a stain on my country that will never be removed. And what will you tell your children, and their children's children, who will be bitterly ashamed of you? It is always the same with the industrialized cultures, whether they be communist or capitalistic:they think they know how everyone should live, and will kill to make everyone live just like they do.
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Jkalos
As clear as it is....I admit,
It's still trying to translate,
'Pinhead' into Mandarin to me.
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@LWM
I wonder what the percentages would be if someone compiled the number of times CIA intervention made things better versus made things worse. Care to guess? Actually compiling that would require figuring out an objective way of determining what is better and what is worse. Not an easy task. Then how would we know if we had a historical record of all the interventions? The number known versus the number unknown, would provide more interesting percentages.
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@RMP
The discussion of the human rights and the Chinese expats can wait for another day. This situation is taking place in Tibet. It was a country until 1951. It was invaded, occupied, and annexed by China. The people in Dharamsala, in Nepal, and elsewhere are not Chinese expats, they are Tibetan.
What the Chinese do to the Chinese is as you say, up for discussion and that discussion involves human rights abuses, which aren't justifiable, and civil rights abuses, which vary from country to country. That's a completely different question.
The Tibetans are rioting in Lhasa. The American media is carrying, in general, the Chinese line. They are doing so because they put so few resources into foreign coverage, and the Beijing and Shanghai bureaus of most American media were so sure that the protests in Tibet were an ignorable miniscule mischief attempting to give the Chinese a black eye on the Olympics, that they ignored them. They dispatched no reporters there. When the shit hit the fan in Lhasa, and the Chinese government closed the place down to foreigners entering, they had no reporters on the ground. They furthermore had contacts by and large only among the Chinese community there, 5% of the population, and the hated 5%. That's not me, the USG, or the CIA making up that hatred, it's real. It happens because the Han are really pretty racist and nationalist towards people like the Tibetans. That's what is meant really when a society is xenophobic.
Today, finally some stories started dribbling out from western press interviewing western tourists. They confirmed that all the Tibetan violence has been pretty strictly targeted at the Chinese. That's not a normal riot, it's more like an uprising. The Chinese press is reporting 10 dead, all Chinese, all brutally burned to death in their shops by Tibetan outlaws. But people have seen shots fired. The Chinese press and the American press are carrying quotes from the head of the PLA. He says the military is staying out of Lhasa. There are photographs running in print in America, Europe, and online, of PLA troops guarding intersections and Chinese business in downtown Lhasa.
Fine if you think we should hear more of the Chinese point of view. Actually, for the first 24 hours, that's all we heard. But when they are outright lying, and the photographs and videos are there to prove it, and it comes down to "Who you gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?", then I'm afraid its time to realize there are 3 sides to the story, not two, and the Chinese point of view is an official lie, and a pretty bad one, right now.